Inside Morgan Stanley's Hong Kong tech interview problems
When interviewing for technology jobs at investment banks, coding tests are standard. However, not all coding tests are the same.
We recently highlighted four coding problems you could face at a Morgan Stanley tech interview, but in Asia the coding questions might be of a different nature.
A Hong Kong based technologist posted details of a recent Morgan Stanley interview on Leetcode. He applied for a technology analyst position on the island and he says these are the questions you could expect.
First Unique Character
The first problem the interviewee encountered they likened to the popular leetcode problem, "First Unique Character in a String." When given a string of lower case letters, you must return the index number of the first unique character within the sequence.
You would appear quite lucky to get this problem. Ranked as easy on Leetcode, 59.6% of users were able to solve it, with the top ranked solution doing so in just seven lines of Java code. You can see that solution here.
Visiting Cities
A decidedly more wordy problem than the previous question, this problem involves calculating the minimum cost of travelling between two cities connected by two bus lines. The problem itself can be seen below.
One solution suggests that you iterate through each station, starting with the first, and calculate the cost of switching lines. Should it work out as cheaper they switch, otherwise they remain on the initial line. Their solution, written in Python, can be seen below.
Multiple Choice Questions
The interviewee said that, after their two coding questions came four multiple choice. One such question can be seen below:
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